Faculty Publication Database

Listing of faculty publications on Singapore with available abstracts and links

Please search below from our database of more than 8,000 Singapore-related publications. Updates with abstracts and additions of new publications are ongoing. To search more effectively, please use the MLA or APA citation style which uses the author’s last name and initials.

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Students of history and strategic studies will welcome the renewed availability of this classic study of the geographical, technological, and political forces which shaped the strategic importance of Singapore over the seven centuries prior to Britain's withdrawal of its military in 1971. The four authors have all taught or studied at the University of Singapore. John N. Miksic contributed the first four chapters, the first of which draws on archaeological evidence and scattered sources to sketch the centuries prior to the arrival of the British in 35 pages. The fact that Singapore had flourished as a commercial and political centre during the fourteenth century as described in the Malay Annals (1611) influenced Stamford Raffles' choice of the island as the site of a new British military and trading centre. The Dutch posed a threat to the new settlement until an 1824 treaty exchanged British interests in Sumatra for Dutch acceptance of Britain's development of the Malay Peninsula. Four chapters (two by Miksic and two by Chiang Ming Shun) focus on the construction of the island's defences and the impact of the shift from sail to steam power on its strategic position through the end of the First World War. During that conflict British officials had to call upon their then ally, Japan, to assist in subduing a mutiny by the Indian Army's 5th Light Infantry, a fact remembered by the Japanese and the people of Singapore, but soon forgotten by Britain.

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Across 15 chapters, professors of history and military history experts present their analyses and impressions about the Fall of Singapore in 1942, which was even described by Winston Churchill himself as “the greatest disaster in British military history”. Discussed at length is the Malayan Campaign and the “Singapore Strategy”, with problems and events related to the pre-war period as well as the conduct of the campaign itself.
Highlights include extensive discussions on the reasons for Japanese success and British failure as well as Ground Zero perspectives from Japanese soldiers fighting on the island and civilians facing evacuation. What follows is a more complete and comprehensive picture painted of this turbulent period in Singapore’s history.

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People from a dozen modern states were directly involved in the 1942 fall of Singapore: The United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, India, Pakistan, Nepal, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Indonesia, China and above all Malaysia and Singapore. To commemorate its 60th anniversary, the Department of History at the National University of Singapore organised an international conference of historians, students and war veterans on the theme Sixty Years On: The Fall of Singapore Revisited. This book presents a selection of the papers presented at the conference, revised for publication. It is not meant to be the last word on all aspects relating to the Malayan campaign and the fall of Singapore but rather an attempt to pull together reassessments of arguments of very long standing about major issues such as the Singapore strategy, with fresh contributions to our knowledge such as a discussion of how Japanese soldiers experienced the fighting on Singapore Island. Both conference and volume aimed to provide a well-rounded, state of the art discussion of the central issues and some of the shadows, relating to the fall of Singapore.